Accelerating sustainability with cloud AI
Justin Keeble
Managing Director for Global Sustainability
Today, sustainability is increasingly at the top of corporate agendas across the world. That means lowering carbon emissions, meeting regulatory requirements, creating a more transparent supply chain, and enacting better corporate citizenship.
At Google Cloud, we believe that accelerating sustainability comes from harnessing powerful, purpose-built information technology capable of working at a global level. That's why we’re proud to expand our suite of AI-powered solutions aimed at helping our customers find new ways to sustainably measure, optimize, and transform their operations.
At Google Cloud Next this year, we’re announcing four key sustainability initiatives:
New Environment APIs on Google Maps Platform including Solar, Pollen, and Air Quality APIs. These products apply AI and machine learning along with aerial imagery and environmental data to share up-to-date information about solar potential, air quality and pollen levels. The Solar API, for example, can help solar installers see how much sunlight buildings receive, and potential energy savings from implementing solar, in order to design optimal panel layouts.
A new BigQuery connector to Google Earth Engine can drive deeper interoperability between these two platforms, improving ease of use for workflows and enabling new analytics that combine raster and tabular data. This is enabling Woza, a Google Cloud partner, to help consumer packaged goods companies monitor farming impacts at the field level.
Carbon Footprint for Google Workspace can empower companies to track the carbon footprint of using Workspace. It can also help users understand the carbon emissions from Google Workspace product usage, breaking down emissions by services, such as Gmail or Drive. This complements Google Cloud Carbon Footprint, which already helps customers measure, track and report on the gross carbon emissions associated with the electricity of their Google Cloud Platform usage.
Finally, we have launched an initiative with Deloitte to accelerate the adoption of sustainability solutions. These include a fleet solution for electrified vehicles that allows a single view of resource optimization, telematics, and climate-related impact. Working with Climate Engine, Deloitte and Google Cloud are helping financial service companies like NatWest better understand their customer’s climate and nature impacts. Deloitte is the first global system integrator to join our rapidly expanding Google Cloud Ready - Sustainability partner program.
These AI-powered tools can bring new insights to help companies to take action for greater sustainability on a global level. They’re one example of Google Cloud's commitment to driving transformation, a key element of addressing climate change. Google has matched its electricity use on an annual basis with 100 percent renewable energy every year since 2017, and is now pursuing an ambitious goal of operating its entire business on carbon-free energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, by 2030. Since we set this goal in 2020, many organizations and governments have joined us on the carbon-free journey.
Tools and initiatives like the ones we are announcing at Next are critical to realizing a vision of a cleaner, more efficient, sustainable and prosperous future for everyone. We're grateful to our partners, and look forward to telling you more soon.
